Price When Reviewed

512GB: $37 I 1TB: $60 I 2TB: $107

Best Prices Today: Solidigm P41 Plus NVMe SSD

This older design from Solidigm couldn’t fairly sustain with newer SSDs in artificial benchmarks, however it was on par in our real-world switch assessments, given comparatively small knowledge units.

Note that saying an NVMe SSD lagged a tad is a bit like saying the final place F1 automobile is sluggish — all of them get across the course in a rush. Moreover, the P41 Plus is accessible at some startlingly low costs on the time of this writing.

Further studying: See our roundup of the best PCIe 4.0 SSDs to find out about competing merchandise.

What are the P41 Plus options?

The P41 Plus is a bunch reminiscence bus (HMB) PCIe 4.0 x4 design that makes use of gadget reminiscence for major caching duties. This is enabled by a SMI SM2269XT controller addressing 144-layer QLC NAND. Secondary caching is writing the QLC as one-bit SLC. The drive has been produced in 512GB, 1TB, and 2TB flavors.

Solidigm affords a five-year guarantee on the P41 Plus, which is mitigated by a somewhat paltry 400TBW (terabytes that may be written earlier than the drive wears out) per-terabyte ranking. Granted, most QLC SSDs supply comparatively low TBW scores, which is one motive we suggest TLC sorts every time doable. Then once more, given that the majority customers don’t write all that a lot knowledge, and the value of this SSD is so low…

How a lot does the P41 Plus value?

A the time of this writing, the 512GB P41 Plus was out there on Amazon for $37.50, with the 1TB and 2TB fashions priced at $69.99 and $106.75, respectively. That places it among the many lowest-priced PCIe 4.0 drives we’ve examined.

How quick is the P41 Plus?

The 2TB P41 Plus that we examined didn’t do all that nicely within the artificial benchmarks, with one exception, nonetheless: It was higher than common in our 48GB transfers.

While the P41 Plus’s single-queue 4K numbers (see beneath) weren’t nice, even for an HMB design, it exceeded the norm within the 32-queue learn.

The P41 Plus turned in excellent 48GB switch instances, dropping solely to the quickest HMB design we’ve examined, WD’s SN770M — a 2230 (30mm lengthy) type issue SSD.

The P41 Plus fell nicely off the tempo within the 450GB write, largely as a result of it ran out of secondary cache, and the controller didn’t well (as some do) allot extra. You can see precisely how far within the chart beneath and the display screen seize following.

The P41 Plus fell to round 200MBps to 300MBps when writing its QLC NAND natively, i.e. the total 4 bits. That’s not nice, however hardly the worst we’ve seen just lately. The QLC Corsair MP600 Core Mini dropped all the best way to 100MBps.

I additionally examined the P41 Plus with Solidigm’s personal Windows NVMe driver, which ups the first HMB caching from 64MB to 78MB. There was a slight uptick in most efficiency areas, and a pleasant leap from sixteenth place general to eleventh within the 48GB switch take a look at due to improved writing of the recordsdata and folders combine. Kudos to Solidigm for even writing its personal driver.

Should you purchase the P41 Plus?

Though it’s not the quickest PCIe 4.0 NVMe SSD available on the market by an extended shot, all NVMe SSDs are lightning-quick in comparison with older applied sciences and don’t bottleneck your system besides in excessive instances. If you’re on a finances, aren’t searching for showy benchmark numbers, and don’t switch massive quantities of information repeatedly, then the P41 Plus will do the job properly — and prevent a good amount of money within the course of.

How we take a look at

Internal drive assessments presently make the most of Windows 11, 64-bit working on an X790 (PCIe 4.0/5.0) motherboard/i5-12400 CPU combo with two Kingston Fury 32GB DDR5 4800MHz modules (64GB of reminiscence whole). Both 20Gbps USB and Thunderbolt 4 are built-in to the again panel and Intel CPU/GPU graphics are used. The 48GB switch assessments make the most of an ImDisk RAM disk taking over 58GB of the 64GB of whole reminiscence. The 450GB file is transferred from a 2TB Samsung 990 Pro which additionally runs the OS.

Each take a look at is carried out on a newly formatted and TRIM’d drive so the outcomes are optimum. Note that in regular use, as a drive fills up, efficiency could lower because of much less NAND for secondary caching, in addition to different components. This is much less of an element with the present crop of SSDs with their far quicker NAND.

Caveat: The efficiency numbers proven apply solely to the drive we had been shipped and to the capability examined. SSD efficiency can and can differ by capability because of extra or fewer chips to shotgun reads/writes throughout and the quantity of NAND out there for secondary caching. Vendors additionally sometimes swap elements. If you ever discover a big discrepancy between the efficiency you expertise and that which we report, by all means, tell us.